In this edition, I decided to step away from the relative comfort of my dedicated production studio and go basic, recording only with my iPad and a free app called Recorder. I did this as an exercise to show that it isn’t really necessary to invest in a mountain of gear just to get your voice committed to disk. I also give a simple explanation of a podcast publishing setup that, while hardly optimal, could technically allow you to publish a podcast (including getting that podcast into iTunes) without spending any money on web hosting.

Did you know that YouTube provided RSS feeds for all of the site’s users? It wasn’t a highly promoted feature but it was there. In fact, I used it and found it to be a handy way to follow my channel subscriptions without having to log in to the YouTube dashboard for updates. But YouTube users’ RSS feeds are no more. The Google-owned video giant has shut them down in the latest version of its API.

Of course, YouTube RSS feeds never worked like podcast RSS feeds. You couldn’t actually download media thru them. And while many podcasters use YouTube to supplement their main shows, this RSS issue isn’t likely to affect them directly. If anything, it’ll have the most impact on creators who are only distributing their shows via YouTube. Regardless, I can’t help but wonder, given Google’s unpredictable history when it comes to RSS support, is this another nail in the coffin for FeedBurner?

Like YouTube, FeedBurner is also owned by Google. But unlike YouTube, Google has pretty much abandoned FeedBurner. Yet, many podcasters still rely on FeedBurner to handle the RSS feeds for their shows. And anytime I see that, I worry a little bit for those shows.

On one hand, I understand why podcasters still flock to FeedBurner. At its core, it’s a handy service with some decent features. I even used it myself for some of my early podcasts, back when there weren’t many dedicated podcasting tools to speak of. On the other hand, it’s not 2005 anymore. I wouldn’t use FeedBurner now and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who’s starting a new podcast. It’s risky enough using a third-party service to handle your RSS feed. It seems even riskier to use a service that’s been severely neglected by its owner, especially when that owner hasn’t had a good track record of supporting RSS.

For everyone out there still using the service, I hope it’s meeting your needs and that it continues to do so for a long time to come. But as more time passes, it seems like Google is separating itself from RSS entirely. And that can’t be good for FeedBurner’s future.

The upcoming release of Windows Phone 8.1 looks to be a major rework of the OS that runs Windows-enabled mobile phones. While the release date for Windows Phone 8.1 has not yet been announced, developer previews of the operating system have been available for a couple months. Those with access to this preview version of Windows Phone 8.1 have noted that the OS comes with a podcast aggregator app as a standard feature. This is good news for podcast listeners and producers, as it’ll create an easy way for Windows Phone users to subscribe to podcasts. If you want to ensure that your podcast will be easy to add to this new aggregator, you’ll need to follow one simple guideline: Be sure your podcast’s RSS feed is discoverable by Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

The new Windows Phone 8.1 Podcasts app won’t be powered by a built-in directory like most other podcast aggregators. Instead, when a user wants to add a new show, they’ll enter either a show title or a subject of interest into the Windows Phone Podcasts app’s search box. From there, the app will do a Bing search for the show title or subject. And from those results, it’ll help the user get subscribed to new shows. For this reason, the search engine must be able to easily locate your podcast’s RSS feed. And while it may seem like an obvious requirement to have your show’s RSS feed linked from your main podcast website, there are still a lot of podcasters who (for whatever reason) don’t do this.